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Topic: MMMM pizza! (pics) (Read 6184 times)

I gave Randy's recipe a go today.. and I must say.. Hats off to you good sir! this is excellent! this crust tastes EXACTLY like P-John's. I love it.

I like my pizza topped chicago style, so I threw some sliced cheese on, then some pepperoni, some crushed tomatoes, a sprinkle of parmesean, and a dash of dried basil. It was delicious! check out the pics!

I assume Randy has a reason for using high-gluten flour instead of either bread flour or all-purpose flour. However, there is no reason why all-purpose flour shouldn't work. Since I started experimenting with Randy's American pizza dough, I have wondered what Papa John's pizza dough is made up of. Some time ago, Randy posted the ingredients, and for updating purposes I did some Google searches today and found the following list of ingredients (as reported by Papa John's in January 2003):

The stuff in parentheses after the flour is just the standard B-vitamin complex that is present in just about all flours. Ascorbic acid is Vitamin C, which many millers add to flours. Papa John's indicated (in response to inquiry from a vegan) that the enzymes are fungal in nature. That suggests amylase in fungal form. Amylase, whether in fungal form or in the form of diastatic malt (like barley malt), serves to increase the extraction of sugar from the damaged starch molecules. That usually means faster fermentation and more residual sugar to enhance crust browning. Unlike Randy's American pie recipe, Papa John's has indicated (also in response to a vegan inquiry) that it does not use honey in its dough. Still, in terms of basic ingredients and their predominance in the Papa John's pizza dough, Randy's recipe is pretty close.

The ingredient list I found for Papa John's pizza sauce (also as of January 2003) was as follows:

Thanks for your response, and all you great posts on this board. I'm new here and already know that you're "one of the pros".

So are you saying that I can make a crust similar to Papa John's without hi-gluten flour? That is my favorite pizza and that's my whole purpose in being here, to learn to replicate PJ's dough. I though I was going to have to find KASL to get it done right, with Randy's recipie. But it seems like you'd propose it could be done with AP four.

It seems like I read that whole wheat flour is higher-gluten than normal AP flour. Is that how PJ's get's there's so chewy, with the enriched wheat flour (enriched wheat flour != whole wheat flour I know, but perhaps both are higher-gluten)?

I don't want you to think that I have forgotten you. I had, in fact, prepared a draft of a response to your question and was about to post it when Randy, in another thread, quoted some materials from Papa John's that strongly suggested that a high-gluten flour was used at PJ's. When I went to the PJ website to look for nutritional information, and hopefully more information on their dough, I saw a new statement that said that a high-protein proprietary blend was being used in their doughs. That broad statement can include everything from all-purpose flour up to high-gluten flour. (King Arthur, for example, routinely refers to such flours as being "high-protein".)

To try to get more information on the PJ flour, I called PJ today and spoke to a woman whose name and telephone number I found on a vegan forum, where I had previously found the ingredient list for the PJ dough and PJ sauce referenced in my earlier post. The woman did not know what kind of flour was being used and went offline for a minute to get the answer only to return to say that the flour blend was proprietary and could not be revealed to me. She wouldn't even tell me whether PJ changed flours. She did say, however, that the dough ingredients were the same as what I earlier reported. The pizza sauce seems to have changed a bit, however. She offered to send me an email with the latest dough and sauce ingredients. If the email does in fact come, I will report on what I learn.

Tom Lehmann does not believe that there is anything particularly unusual about PJ's dough. I have read (I believe from something that Snowman wrote) that PJ makes deliveries of fresh doughs to its stores twice a week. I don't know if that is so, but to do that suggests that PJ is using a low-yeast, low-temperature approach to dough production and management. Once I see the list of dough ingredients currently being used by PJ (apart from the specific flour blend), and leveraging off of the work that Randy has already done with his American pie recipe, I think it will be possible to come up with a dough formulation that is a reasonable facsimile of what PJ is using. What would be particularly helpful at this point is to get an idea as to a typical PJ dough ball weight for a specific sized (diameter) pizza. That information would enable me to get a better idea of dough thickness. From there, we might be able to come up with some baker's percents that would apply to the weight of the dough ball.

BTW, whole-wheat flour is not the same as enriched wheat flour. Whole-wheat flour is what is produced from basic wheat grains. It has the highest protein content and will yield more gluten than any other wheat flour. Enriched wheat flour is basically whole-wheat flour from which some or most of the bran, germ, etc., have been removed. As I understand it, the enrichment comes from adding the B vitamins to the processed flour to replace some of the nutrition that was processed out of the whole-wheat flour.

I've baked bread, cookies and other stuff before, but I've never heard of high-gluten flour until I found this site a few weeks ago. Now it seems so obvious that the chewyness is what's between me and a good pizza crust. So I'm trying to find the best/cheapest way to get my hands on some KASL. I'll be sure and report on my results whenever I finally get some.

Until then, I'll continue to make the xPHmgr's Pizza Hut Pan Pizza recipe with KABF, and I'll probably experiment with some enriched wheat flour, since it'll be higher gluten, and I do like wheat bread, it would probably make a decent pizza crust, and mabey with a little better chew.

In my earlier post, I indicated that I was expecting an email from Papa John's telling me the ingredients for its products. After a follow-up email to PJ's, I received a Word document today from PJ's providing that information. The document indicates at the top that "Ingredients are not necessarily listed in order of predominance", although my sense is that the listings are pretty consistent with government regulations that require listing by order of predominance. An additional note on the bottom of the document says that "This listing is true and accurate as of August 30, 2005."

I have cut and pasted below the information provided in the PJ document for Cheese, Pizza Dough, Pizza Sauce, Robusto Pizza Sauce, and Dustinator (the blend PJ uses during shaping of their dough into skins).

As previously noted, PJ's has changed the information previously provided on its website in which it touted the high-protein nature of its pizza flour, and now only references a proprietary blend. The Pizza Dough ingredient list above is equally vague and general.

I also assume that when PJ's says that its pizza sauce uses "vine-ripened fresh tomatoes" that it is referring to a fresh-pack tomato such as sold by Stanislaus, or similar vendor that puts citric acid in with the tomatoes.